During the latest episode of Insights with Chris Van Vliet, WWE Superstar Bianca Belair spoke on a number of subjects, including her broken finger, the hair braid as part of her character, Naomi’s heel turn and more!
On her broken finger and when it happened:
“It looks more like a real finger now. So I have to wear my ring finger on my right hand now because my ring doesn’t fit. It’s healed, it won’t fully straighten. I broke it in two or three different spots. I broke it up here in the middle and then down in the joint. So it was when we were doing the triple German spot, when IYO was on the top rope, and then it was Rhea, then it was me, and I came in German suplexed both of them off, and my hand got stuck underneath Rhea. Also I went to the wrong side of Rhea, but my hand, I thought she was gonna go further over me, we kind of just collapsed together. So when my hand went back, it got stuck under her, and she literally crashed on my hand. I knew immediately it was broken, because usually in a match, something happens, and you don’t feel it until after the match, your adrenaline wears off, and you’re like, Ow, my finger. But in the moment I thought I broke all my fingers. So the ref, you can see the ref if you watch back, the ref comes to me. He’s like, ‘Are you okay?’ I’m like, ‘I just broke all of my fingers!’ You just see me rolling around on the ground, and it took Rhea to snap me out of the moment, because I was just rolling around on the ground. And she’s like, ‘Bianca, Bianca!’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ Oh, we have to finish this match. Honestly, after she snapped me back into I didn’t feel it at all for the rest of the match. I didn’t feel it until I got to the back and I was like, Oh, I broke my finger, and I didn’t think it was that serious.”
On her hair braid as part of her character, the hair whip and how to make the noise:
“So I was, again, I was trying to figure out, like, what do I want to look like? I want to have a unique look. And I was looking at all the girls that were there. They would wear their hair down. It was beautiful. I want to wear my hair down, I want to feel beautiful and I just loved how all the girls were, glamorous. But I wore a braid one time, and my husband, he was like, ‘That’s your thing. You have to stick with it.’ He’s like, ‘You have to keep the braid.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I feel like, sometimes I feel like I look better with the long hair.’ He’s like, ‘But everybody does that. The best way to stand out here is to do something that nobody else is doing. Look at what everybody else is doing, and if that works for them, go the complete opposite way. The first time somebody comes to a show, they might not remember your name for the first time, but they’ll remember the girl with the braid.’ And I was like, All right, I’m the girl with the braid. Yeah, a lot of people think that production adds a special effect to it, no [there’s no sound effect]. And every time that I do it, it’s loud. I thought Sasha was the loudest. And then when I hit Becky, it surprises me. I’m like, Oh, that sounds like that hurt. Sorry. You know, every time it gets louder and louder. [The welt it leaves is crazy]. So that’s why I don’t do it a lot too. For one, I don’t want the audience to get used to it, and I don’t want to just mark up people. “It’s a special way that I braid it, and I can whip it in the air. This is my appearance one, it’s not braided. So when I braid a certain way, if I can hear the way that it goes in the wind, I can tell if it’s a hair whip braid. I’m like, Yep, that’s it. We’re good.”
On when Jade Cargill attacked Naomi and the follow-up promo:
“I just try to pull from just experiences that we had as Tag Team Champions, even with Naomi. Naomi and I, we were always friends before we were in a tag team. But when we got into a tag team, I feel like I just got so much more closer to her, I’ve learned so much from her inside and outside the ring. So it’s like in my heart, that’s my best friend. Then me and Jade, we were able to be a tag team, and we’re able to be Tag Team Champions, and put the division on the map, and do the things that we wanted to do. And just being in this position, I just try to see it as I’m literally watching my best friend get beat up. Then I just try to just hone into that and like this is awful. You have your two best friends fighting each other, and I’d really just try to, I don’t know, just tap into that and just pull the realism out of it. We have amazing chemistry. I can look at Naomi, it just felt so emotional. For one, when we were a tag team and us not being able to have that long run. When I was in NXT, Naomi was on the main roster, pitching for us to be a tag team from the very beginning, and that was something that was always wanted, and we finally got to have it and then it was, like, cut short. So that was emotional for me, too. And then, you know, just the realism in her promo and us being able to just hone in and click. Before we did that promo Hunter came up to us and he said, you guys are in there. This is just a conversation between you two. And just look at it that way. So I think for us, we wanted it to be something where everybody felt like they were listening to a conversation that they really weren’t supposed to be listening to. A lot of times you do promos and you’re kind of talking to the crowd, and you open up to the crowd. Never once, it was just me and her locked in. It really felt like you were watching a conversation and listening to a conversation you weren’t supposed to be listening to, and we were able to just lock in together and bring that emotion. A lot of it was real.”
You can watch the full interview below:
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